Chapter 5. Icebreaker

Enrique gave me a serious look. “Look, kid. You haven’t slept in at least 36 hours, I’m guessing, and I’m not going to let you run last click.”

“Last click?” The phrase thrilled me though I wasn’t sure why.

“It’s a runner term for jacking in when you’re tired. Running last click is the fastest way to get flatlined by a nasty piece of ice or to get yourself tagged. Then you wake up with a gun barrel in your face. Or sometimes White Tree gets a hold of your DNA and puts it on the Registry. Then you can't even buy a bottle of water from a vending machine without the possibility of some customized poison sending you into anaphylaxis.”

I didn’t have a reply ready to that heavy piece of advice. Sitting in the genteel bar, dust dancing in the afternoon light, the quiet room occupied by a few corporate employees calling it an early day, I almost couldn’t believe there was a secret criminal world behind the ordinary one, and that I had seen a sliver of it.

“So after I’ve slept, then can I make a run?”

“Let’s talk about a few things first. You want to start making runs to find out what happened to your friend.”

“That’s right.”

“And I want to help you, but running is hard work. It takes preparation, always. You don’t always want to face-check the ice.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It means trying to break a piece of ice with your face.”

“Oh.”

“Let’s take it from the beginning.” At that moment, the bartender brought my sandwich, grilled to perfection, with a pickle on the side. I picked it up, let the crunch and honey sweetness play on my tongue. Synthetic ham and plant-based cheese had never tasted so good. I wiped my mouth with my napkin and gestured to Enrique, who was watching me, and smiling with appreciation and a “good-isn’t-it?” expression. “Do you remember the name of the company that was conducting the clinical trial?”

I thought about it. Freya hadn’t told me herself, but I had called the hospital and asked what companies were conducting trials in their wards. The first two people I spoke with hadn’t wanted to tell me either, but the third one, an administrator, had asked me if my name was really Rawls. When I assured her that it was, she said that the name of the company was—

“It was something musical,” I said. “Melody. Melody Biologics.”

Enrique’s face appeared worried. “Melody Biologics is a subsidiary of White Tree, which is the world’s largest medical, agricultural, and biotech company. That synth-ham you’re eating probably comes from a White Tree subsidiary. The same with the anesthetic that Dr. Rashida put on your chest.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you have to be careful if you’re going make a run on a White Tree server. Of the Big Four megacorps, it’s the most secretive, and it’s ice is the most dangerous.”

“Is this something I should ask Gloss about?”

Enrique set a cautioning hand on the bar. “Eventually. But for right now, the important thing is to make sure you’re well-rested and to get you an icebreaker.”

“I got past that simulant ice—Ludo—without a breaker.”

“You can get past simulants by your wits alone, as long as you’re not sluggish and fatigued. White Tree’s ice is a different story. It can bring you to the edge of death if you jack in without an icebreaker. Promise me you will never run against White Tree without a good breaker.”

“I promise.”

“And especially, a breaker that can deal with red ice.”

“What does red ice mean?”

“Red ice is designed to make you bleed.”

I set my sandwich down. I’d been eating too quickly. I found myself apprehensive and baffled. “But this is the net. It’s just information. It can’t hurt me.”

“Just information?” Enrique called the bartender over and ordered a third espresso. When the bartender went away again, Enrique whispered to me. “You know what’s ‘just information?’ The signals your brain sends to your hands to pick up that sandwich. The signals that pass between your brainstem and your heart to keep it beating. That’s ‘just information.’ Do not underestimate how painful an encounter with red ice can be.”

I felt chastened. “OK. I promise I won’t. You said something about getting me an icebreaker?”

“That’s our next stop. Just as soon as you finish your sandwich and I get enough coffee in me.”

Outside the bar, it was getting toward evening. People were streaming in, straight from work in the towers surrounding the place. Enrique and I walked through the city, slower now, down to the metro station beneath the plaza.

The train was much nicer than the BRUTE, cleaner and easier to use. We stood, hanging from the steel bar running along the top of the car, while commuters rode in the seats around us. There were people in suits, construction workers, and others in scrubs off shift from the hospital.

Enrique looked sharper than any of them. He had traded yesterday’s bright suit for a purple paisley outfit, trim and subtly expensive. It felt good to be seen next to him, in my blazer and new jeans.

“This is our stop,” he said, gesturing to an illuminated display that said Old Charlotte. As we left the rail car, he said, “By the way, did you happen to have Dr. Rashida remove the trackers?”

“No.”

“You’ll want to go back and have that done before too long.”

“I meant to ask you about that. Last night we jacked in from your apartment. Was that safe?”

“Perfectly safe for what we were doing. We were using proxies in Kiev and Jakarta. For anything more serious, though, we’d find ourselves a crash space.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“What’s a crash space?”

“A temporary place from which to make runs. Typically you use each one only once, then never return.”

We moved quickly up the long stairway out of the metro station. The bandage pulled at my chest as I moved. I felt some wetness, a reminder that, mere hours ago, I was in surgery for the second time in my life. Wild. Simply wild.

“Here we are,” Enrique said, and opened the door to what looked like a convenience store. There were beers and soda pop in a cooler, and rows and rows of bags of shrimp chips, kelp crisps, and basic pharmaceuticals. It smelled of cardboard and bad coffee. Enrique waved to the woman at the counter and walked directly to the back. He rapped on a door covered in a woodgrain laminate, which opened onto a green-lit back office. I followed him inside and he closed the door behind myself.

The man sitting at the desk inside the tiny office regarded us without feeling. He was a large and powerful man, not unlike Gloss, though bulkier in some ways. He looked perfectly comfortable behind his desk.

“What now?” he said.

“I’m looking for an icebreaker,” Enrique said.

The man—an icebreaker dealer, I guessed—spread his arms as if saying, why else would anyone come talk to me?

Enrique produced a roll of cash from his jacket and set it on the desk. “Do you still have that water strider?”

The icebreaker dealer drummed his fingers on the desk. “You picked the right day to come in, Lima. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but that thing is bedeviling me. I sold it yesterday and today it came back. That’s the third time it’s happened. I haven’t been able to move it.”

“Wonder why,” Enrique Lima said cautiously. He looked at me. I felt a bead of sweat on the small of my back.

“I couldn’t tell you,” the dealer said. “But if you really want it, I’ll sell it to you for a thousand.”

“That’s suspiciously affordable,” Enrique said.

“It might be defective,” the dealer said. “So don’t blame me if your brain gets spattered all over your wall the moment you slot it.”

Enrique passed over the cash, and the dealer reached under the desk to lift up an olive-green metal container the size and shape of shoebox. He slid it over and Enrique placed it in a recycled plastic shopping bag that he unfolded from his jacket. He stood and I followed his lead.

“Who’s this for, anyway?” the dealer said.

Enrique jerked his thumb at me. “This guy.”

“Good luck to you, kid,” the dealer said. “Don’t get got.”

I was starting to feel reluctant about this running thing. But I had promised Freya that I would do it for her, even if only to myself. And I felt like it was important not to show any fear in front of Enrique.

“As long as I don’t run last click, I’ll be fine,” I said.

The dealer laughed.

###

I didn’t know sleep could be this good. When I woke in Enrique’s spare room, the bed beneath me felt impossible to leave, both firm and soft, the kind of mattress I had never slept on before. Growing up, my bed had been a hand-me-down from a cousin with a loose spring that jabbed me in the kidney every night.

As I stretched, I didn’t even feel the bandage on my chest anymore. Stepping into the bathroom, I removed the tape and the gauze and found the surgical wound had closed. Whatever nanotech goop Dr. Qin had smeared over the cut had healed me up quickly. Thanks, White Tree.

The wound looked shiny and pink around the gleaming steel socket. My net port. I remembered the boxy icebreaker we bought last night, and shivered.

In the main room, Enrique was drinking a mug of coffee while Gloss sat at the counter with his tea, working a crossword puzzle.

“There he is,” Enrique said. “How do you feel?”

Scared. Nervous. Like I don’t know whether I could trust Enrique to have my best interests at heart. Gloss I trusted. Dr. Qin I trusted. But Enrique moved too quickly, explained too little.

“I’m not sure about this.”

“It’s normal to be nervous. But you’re going to be fine. We’ll be there monitoring you, and you have a good breaker.”

“About that. What that dealer—”

“Angel.”

“What Angel said about it didn’t fill me with confidence.”

“You bought that from Angel?” Gloss said, sounding worried. “Hope you didn't pay too much.”

Enrique made a maybe-maybe-not gesture and leaned back. Nothing ever seemed to worry him.

“Don’t you guys have breakers?” I said. “Couldn’t I just use one of yours?”

Gloss turned to me, looking professorial. “Icebreakers cannot simply be copied like ordinary programs,” he said.

Enrique moved to the coffee maker. “Now you’ve done it, kid. Get ready for a lecture.”

He pulled a mug down from the cabinet, filled it with sweet, hot, burbling coffee, and handed it to me. The ceramic warmed my hands as I slid onto a stool at the counter next to Gloss and listened.

“Moreover, most icebreakers are specific to a runner, tuned to that runner’s unique biology and brain patterns. It takes time and custom software to adapt one breaker to another runner. When a runner codes a breaker, they influence its style, its presence, its capabilities. Even if you could use my breakers, they are too complex to be copied with off-the-shelf hardware. They exist in volatile memory and must be powered, always. The waveforms collapse irretrievably if they become unpowered. Most icebreakers are like this. You need serious simulation capabilities to copy a breaker. As software, they are every bit as complex as a piece of ice. And each piece of ice you will encounter has undergone multi-billion dollars of development. Think about that.”

“So runners have billions of dollars to develop icebreakers?”

“We do more with less,” Enrique said.

“This breaker we bought last night,” I said. “Will it get me killed?”

“No,” Enrique said.

I turned to Gloss. “What do you think?”

“Making a run always carries some risk. But I’ve taken a look at the breaker. It’s a water strider. That’s an old military AI. If it can draw down enough power and enough processing capability from the net, it can get through anything.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” I said.

“It only works once. By the time you jack out, the insides will be a puddle of silicon and tin.”

“Then why did Angel say he thought it was defective?”

“Because he doesn’t understand it and neither do his customers,” Enrique said. “But Gloss and I checked it out while you were sleeping. It’s good. I guarantee it.”

Gloss looked at him sharply.

Enrique held up a hand. “OK, OK. I can’t guarantee it but I am as sure as it is possible to be.”

“Here,” Gloss said, and slid down from the stool. He walked across the main room of the apartment to a bookshelf and reached up to pull a hard-bound volume from the top. Bringing it over to the counter, he opened up the book to reveal a deep, hollow space cut into the pages. Inside was a small piece of electronics with two cables. They looked like they could fit into my net port, or at least could work with it somehow. “We’re going to be monitoring your vitals. If you get into trouble, this switch will get you out of there in one piece.”

Sometimes I wondered if all this was pageantry to trick me into trusting them. Despite that, I did trust Gloss. And I believed in Enrique, at least to some extent.

“So when do I run?” I said.

Enrique and Gloss looked at each other. “Right now,” they said in unison.

###

The crash space was a tiny room with peeling paint over old drywall. In one corner there was an old mattress on the floor next to a small refrigerator. In another was a small bathroom. Under a single, bare light bulb there was a sink and a toilet and a tile shower, dark with mold.

“You don’t have to live here,” Enrique said.

I sat down on the bed and took off my shirt, exposing the net port. Enrique and Gloss went to work around me, taking out the water strider and plugging it into the wall outlet with a cable that looked much thicker than any household appliance cable I had ever seen. They brought out another thing similar to the console I had used the first time, but without the VR goggles. They connected the water strider to it and connected it to the wall outlet as well.

“Jack me in,” I said.

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store Name Credit Chip Manufacturer Too many Legal status Damn near compulsory Description A 1x3 color LCD screen, vibratory motor, and close-range transponder, commonly implanted in a host’s wrist Cost Your mortal soul Function Lets the host rent goods and cadge services in exchange for money they don’t have